96 Minutes
On August 1, 1966, CHARLES WHITMAN climbed to the top of the University of Texas Tower and started firing—and the rest, literally, is history. Here’s what happened on that fateful day, in the words of more than three dozen people who got shot, fired back, lost loved ones, saved lives by risking their own, and otherwise witnessed the nation’s first mass murder in a public place.
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“WHY DID WHITMAN DO IT?”
When an autopsy was performed on Whitman the next morning, Dr. Coleman de Chenar discovered what appeared to be a small brain tumor. The consensus in the medical community, however, was that the tumor was probably not to blame, given its size and location. (Whitman was not neurologically impaired at the time of the shootings, for example; he was a crack shot.) As for what had made him “snap,” there were plenty of theories. Was it his abusive childhood? His overwhelming anger? The amphetamines he consumed, observed one friend, “like popcorn”?
JOHN ECONOMIDY: The day after the shootings, the university held a press conference in the main newsroom of the Daily Texan. It turned out that Whitman had gone into the Student Health Center that spring complaining of terrible headaches and depression and had seen a psychiatrist named Maurice Heatly. Heatly was the brother of a very powerful state legislator, and that caused some embarrassment politically, because—as the university, to its credit, immediately disclosed—Whitman had told him exactly what he planned to do. Heatly wrote in his report, which was released to reporters, that Whitman was “oozing with hostility” and had expressed a desire to go to the top of the Tower and shoot people with a deer rifle. That was a jaw-dropper. Heatly defended himself by saying that if he committed every kid who threatened to jump off the Tower or do harm to others, there would be a lot of people in the psychiatric ward.
NEAL SPELCE: Why did Whitman do it? [Then-governor] John Connally put together a commission to explore the question, but they couldn’t find a definitive answer. There was nothing anyone could ever point to and say, “Oh, that’s why.” It just remained a mystery.
KINKY FRIEDMAN had graduated in May. A singer, novelist, and 2006 independent gubernatorial candidate, he lives near Kerrville.
I wrote “The Ballad of Charles Whitman” shortly afterward. I’m sure the people who didn’t like it thought I was mocking a tragedy or something, but they didn’t listen to the song. It explores the mind of Charles Whitman and what makes these things happen. The question is, Why? Why would somebody do that? He was a straight-A student, an Eagle Scout, a Marine—just a good all-around, all-American asshole. I doubt if his neighbors thought he was evil. That’s usually how it is: “He was not without his charm.” We profess to find it deplorable, but we’re fascinated because there’s a little bit of Charlie in us all. We’re all capable of terrible acts, and we’re all capable of greatness. It’s a question of which angels we’re listening to, I suppose.
SHELTON WILLIAMS: The cover of Life the next week made a big impression on all of us. The photo, which was taken from the victim’s point of view, was of the Tower, as seen through a window with two gaping bullet holes in it. From that vantage point it looked menacing, even evil—not the triumphant symbol of football victories we were used to.
FORREST PREECE: I was sitting with the rest of the Longhorn Band in Memorial Stadium at the first football game that September when [announcer] Wally Pryor asked us to remember those who had been injured. He suggested giving to the designated people who would be standing with donation cans at the exits. I remember that John Wayne was in attendance, because we were playing his alma mater, USC, and he gave a significant amount of cash. But a story in the next issue of the Daily Texan said that the total take was pitifully small. A friend who was part of the collection effort said he was amazed at how quickly people seemed to forget.
BARTON RILEY: The fall semester started and life went on, just like nothing had ever happened. I never heard it mentioned. Isn’t that amazing? I was rather stunned.
CLAIRE JAMES: I was in intensive care for seven weeks, and I wasn’t released from the hospital until November. I had to learn how to walk again. When I went back to school in January, no one said anything to me or talked about it around me. I almost felt like I had imagined the whole thing. Not one person ever called together the students who’d been injured that day and said, “How are you?” or “We’re so sorry.” I guess that’s just the way it was—it was a measure of the times. We didn’t have the vocabulary at that point to deal with what had happened. If it was mentioned at all, it was always called “the accident.”
“IT WAS LIKE AN INJURY THAT WOULD NEVER HEAL.”
The observation deck was closed after the shootings and then reopened two years later. The board of regents closed it indefinitely in 1974, after a series of suicides. It reopened on September 16, 1999. In 2001 Whitman claimed another life. David Gunby, who had endured chronic kidney problems ever since he was shot in the back, elected to discontinue dialysis. The Tarrant County medical examiner ruled his death a homicide.
BRAD CRIDER is an independent builder living in Austin.
My girlfriend, Ginger, and I live in Charlie Whitman’s house. We signed the lease not knowing; our neighbor across the alleyway was the one who told me. I honestly didn’t think much about it until the first day I was here. I was doing some work on the house when a couple approached me from the street and said, “Do you mind if we take a tour?” They had driven in from Houston to see where Whitman used to live. I said sure, and they were so excited you would have thought they had just won the lottery. Most people just drive by slowly and then turn around and come back for a second look. I’ve seen strangers taking photos of the house; my neighbors have seen people parked in front of their houses, filming from an angle so they won’t be too obvious. Ginger jokes that we should put a plaque in our yard that says “Charlie Whitman doesn’t live here anymore.”
ROSA EBERLY taught a course at UT called “The UT Tower and Public Memory” from 1996 to 2001. She is an associate professor of rhetoric at Penn State University, in University Park, Pennsylvania.
One of the things we looked at was how, in that institutional memory vacuum, pop culture had been able to turn Whitman into a cool antihero. He was the subject of songs and films and even a Web site created by an alum that was called the Charles Whitman Fan Club. Part of why there wasn’t a memorial on campus for so long, I think, was out of concern that it would become a shrine to Whitman.
HARPER SCOTT CLARK: A bullet of Whitman’s had ripped a big chunk out of one of the balustrades on the South Mall, and for the rest of the time I was at UT, whenever my friends and I would stroll by there, we would run our fingers inside it and look up at the Tower and think contemplatively. I went back years later and saw that someone had filled it in with plaster. It was gone, and I remember thinking that was a big mistake.
LARRY FAULKNER was a graduate student in chemistry. The immediate past president of UT-Austin, he lives in Houston, where he is the president of Houston Endowment.
I had been at the university that day. Whitman opened fire moments after I walked off campus. Since that time, the university’s stance had always seemed to be to try to erase what had happened, but with absolutely no success. It was like an injury that would never heal. And I instinctively felt that the way to get past that was to open the observation deck to the public again. I had that as a goal in my mind before I walked on campus as president, in 1998. I believed it was my job to place before the regents a proposal that they could support. And that meant addressing the issues that had caused them to close it in the first place; we had to have a physical barrier to prevent suicides and accidents, and we had to have a credible way of screening for weapons.
ANNIE HOLAND was the student body president for the 1998–1999 academic year. She is the executive vice president and chief operating officer of Holand Investment, in McAllen.
Students had presented proposals to the administration year after year, but there had always been resistance until we met with Dr. Faulkner. The observation deck had been closed for so long that it had become a kind of mystical place. There were all sorts of folk tales around campus about the students who had jumped to their deaths, and Whitman, of course. It was only associated with tragedy.
LARRY FAULKNER: The university had never recognized, in any formal way, the people who had been injured that day. So we enhanced the garden behind the Tower and we dedicated it to them. We also held a memorial service, 33 years after the fact.
CHARLES LOCKE is the tour coordinator at the Tower.
We have hour-long, student-guided tours, but the tragedy that occurred in ’66 is not part of our formal presentation. The guides are encouraged to be knowledgeable about the tragedy so they can respond to questions if they are posed. Our intent is not to make this the “Charles Whitman tour,” because that’s not the reason, we hope, that people visit the Tower. One of the benefits of reopening the Tower is that we can reclaim it as a symbol of academic excellence represented by the university.
BOB HIGLEY: I can’t look at the Tower without thinking of that day. It dominates the silhouette of the city. I love it when we’re number one and they make it orange; that’s a kick for me. But that’s always at night, in the dark. During the day, if I see the Tower, I’m carried back. I think about how Paul Sonntag was eighteen years old when he died. And the week before August 1, and the week after, I think about it night after night.
CLIF DRUMMOND: I’m a country boy, and so I had always loved to go to the Tower. It was a high place, and we don’t have high places in West Texas. When you got up there, it was calm and cool, and you could see for a long ways. You could see all over campus, all over this beautiful city, way out to the Hill Country. People went up there all the time. And Charles Whitman ruined that. He took it away from us. It may sound trivial, but he took that away.
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